Strengthening electron-triggered light emission

It's a way to make lots of light with an accelerator, if you can get a good clean surface of a metamaterial inside the vacuum... not an entirely new idea.

On a sunny day (Sat, 7 Jan 2023 00:09:18 -0800 (PST)) it happened whit3rd snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

But the consequences are, quotes from the article:

These might ultimately be able to perform some functions that currently require giant underground tunnels, such as the 30-kilometer-wide Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

"If you could actually build electron accelerators on a chip," SoljaÄMiÄG says, "you could make much more compact accelerators for some of the applications of interest, which would still produce very energetic electrons."

"The new system could also potentially provide a highly controllable X-ray beam for radiotherapy purposes, Roques-Carmes says."

Many silly things like for example CERN does can be done on the desktop. I have stated that many times here, even recently: "If you cannot do it with those small particles on the desktop, 'then you cannot do it in a machine the size of the universe"

OTOH CERN makes probably great bomb shelters or places to hide from glowball warning eeeeh _warming_ and cooling.

Pipe dream, since all they got is a way to make a glow without phosphors.

Not without an accelerator; it talks of 1kV electron beams, and you can't keep current flowing without a LOT of power, or... a ring. Needn't be much (not relativistic, just a cyclotron), but it ain't a tabletop item. And, you can't do it 'on a chip' at 1 keV scale.

The big CERN item is not an electron accelerator, but a hadron accelerator. No functional similarity to a Cerenkov-like light producer described in the article. CERN probably has desktop machines where appropriate, already.

Many laboratories actively search for ways to make accelerators more compact.

At CERN, we have AWAKE, using wake fields created by a proton beam in a plasma to accelerate electrons. Another idea, still a future project, is CLIC, which would use lots of moderate energy electron beams to generate high power RF which is then used to accelerate a single electron beam in a parallel beam pipe. 'CLIC' stands for "Compact LInear Collider". It's compact in the sense that a far bigger machine would be needed to reach the projected multi-TeV energy with traditional means. It's projected to be 11 km long initially, and up to 50 km eventually.

Both projects promise accelerating gradients exceeding 100 MV/m, much more than has been achieved up to present. To give an idea of the magnitude of the achievement, consider that air will break down at about 1 MV/m.

Neither AWAKE, nor CLIC will fit on a desktop, for sure.

As for creating light with electron beams, there are many machines built specifically for that purpose. I know of Soleil and ESRF in France, PSI in Switzerland, Diamond in the UK and Sesame in Jordan. There are many more. Synchrotron light is very useful for all sorts of applications.

An even more exciting development are Free Electron Lasers, which produce extremely intense coherent EM radiation pulses from the visible all the way into the hard X-ray domain. Both synchrotron light sources and FELs are basically electron synchrotrons typically sized in the several-hundred meter circumference ballpark.

Again, none of this will fit on a desktop, not ever.

Jeroen Belleman

On a sunny day (Sat, 07 Jan 2023 14:49:10 +0100) it happened Jeroen Belleman snipped-for-privacy@nospam.please wrote in <tpbt8m$1t69$ snipped-for-privacy@gioia.aioe.org>:

My old CRT monitor now sleeping in the attic creates light and even a color picture from the electron beam. And fits easily on a desktop (was there for years). I hang on to it, my personal accelerator!

Yeah, but it'd burn the screen if it didn't scan continuously. To run the novel glow-producing gizmo,the beam needs to be stationary, close to a clean metamaterial surface, and maybe cold (unless the new light production isn't a Bose statistics boost). Lower voltage, higher current than the CRT. And maybe tricks like B-field focus won't be applicable; the CRT electrons are taking a few helical paths.